Sandeep Junnarkar, from the New York Times, told me when he was going to call, and that he wanted to talk about how to set up and promote a videoblog.

So I made a few notes.

In general, I'm happy with Sandeep's basic overview, but want to add some detail to help you promote your video blog.

From my notes:

1. Do nothing, Google will find you.
The easiest way to promote your video blog, is to do nothing. Google will find you. Just make sure that you annotate your video blog post with text that describes what's in the video. For example, if you search Google for Boston Marathon Video, or Blizzard 05 Video, look who comes up. It's me!

Boston was hit with another snowstorm today. We had fun though, going outside to shovel with Carol's mom!

Production Notes:
This video was shot with my Canon S400. I imported the .avi files into Final Cut Pro, and then resized each of them to fill the frame. You've got to turn on Image+Wireframe AND Title Safe. Then you click open each clip and then click and drag it to fill the frame.

Next, I edited all the segments together and exported the movie.

Then I imported the movie into Soundtrack and added the music. After that, I exported the music as a .aif file and imported that into FCP.

Once in FCP, I adjusted the levels for the music.

Finally, I exported the completed movie, opened it with Sorenson Squeeze, and exported a final .mov file.

Once that was complete, I droped the file into my vblogcentral client, and vblogcentral then created versions in QuickTime, Windows ands Real. When completed, the resulting video was posted to my test blog and from there I copied the code over here.

A record turnout, somewhat ironically, ensued; despite the enormous crowd, interesting discussion took place. The producer gave the group permission to blog that they had filmed us, and blog they did; along with the live notes taken by a regular group member, many other posts have sprung up around the web.

Production Notes:
Attending the meeting with a video camera is different than attending a meeting without one.

Attending a meeting where a film crew from Nightline is filming is different than attending a meeting without one.

By the time I got there, the room was already overflowing out into the hallway. So I turned on my camera, a Canon GL/2, and started shooting from the doorway. This vantage point gave me a view of the whole room, with a clear shot at most of the attendees, except for those against the same wall that I was leaning against.

Shooting
The wall was my tripod. I didn't bring my tripod because I knew that there wouldn't be enough room for it.

So as the discussion progressed, I grabbed shots of those people that were speaking. Sometimes I could only grab a side shot of the speaker, or a very poor shot. Since I wasn't getting any usable video at those moments, that's when I shot my cut aways: shots of the Nightline camera crew, their camera, microphone, reaction shots of attendees, computers, computer screen, an iPod, etc.

Later in editing, I'd decide not to use most of the poor shots, and focus on those that looked the best. In general, I feel that I got a lot of the main discussion points.

I did use one shot of Lisa Williams from behind, because I felt that her content was too valuable to leave out.

Sometimes a cut away shot was used to mask poor video such as someone walking in front of the camera.

Halfway through the meeting I changed postions and stood in another doorway. This gave me a differnet perspective of the room, allowing me to get great shots of some of the other attendees who were talking.

I had a 60 minute tape and stopped taping at about 52 minutes when the discussion changed topics. At that point I put my camera away.

At the end of the meeting the Nightline reporter asked a great question, "Why do you come to these meetings?"

The response from the attendees was great, and will make great footage for Nightline. At that point, the meeting was pretty much over, and the responses from people were more natural. Even though it was obvious that the camera was still on, the question elicited true feelings, vs. stands on the issues, like we heard in the first part of the meeting.

Editing
Editing the video took about eight hours. First, it took one hour to log and capture the footage into Final Cut Pro. The I went through it, in order, to grab out the best audio/video segments. After dropping them into the timeline, I went back through the footage for cut aways.

I'd read some of the blog posts about the meeting which talked about how much of an impact the camera crew had on the precededings. They were a big presence in the room, so I put in a lot of shots of the Nightline crew to show what it felt like to have them there.

Next up I added a dip to color transition between each speaker.

After that I started adding titles to identify each speaker. I knew most of the speakers. For those that I didn't know, I grabed a still frame of them and emailed the pictures to Andy Carvin and Lisa Williams. They helped me complete the identitfication.

Once that was done, I added the titles and credits.

I used Soundtrack to 'compose' the into/outro music.

Compression
At this point, I exported the final edit out of Final Cut Pro and imported it into Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson takes the output from Final Cut Pro and compresses it for web delivery.

That process took about 20 minutes.

After compressing, I reviewed the complete 10 minute video and noticed thatthe sound on the very last clip was too soft. So that meant that I had to go back into FCP, edit the sound, re-export, and re-compress with Squeeze.

Posting to the web
Next, I took the final exported QuickTime file and dropped it into, vblogcentral, my desktop application that posts the video to my hosting provider for transcoding into three different versions for the web, QuickTime, Windows Media Player, and Real.

At this point it's a waiting game. You've got to wait for all the versions of the video to be transcoded, before a link is automatically posted to your blog.

So what I did, was go to vblogcentral's host and grab the URL of the QuickTime file and post a link to that right away. That way anyone who wanted to watch the video last night, could see the QuickTime version. This morning, I replaced that link with the one you now see that allows you to choose which player your want.

I've also include a hidden enclosure tag to this post for anyone who has subscribed to this blog's RSS 2.0 feed. That allows those that use a feedreader, that understands enclosures, to automatically download the video for viewing.

I'll be interestied to see what Nightline chooses to show in their segment.